CICS and SFS

One of the most annoying issues with CICS on a Windows/Unix platform is SFS. CICS uses SFS to access its "database" which is nothing more than a bunch of flat ascii files. This is really not a database but can cause you a lot of grief if your CICS region is shut down improperly and SFS has a lock on a particular file. If your SFS file system gets hosed, one of the easiest ways of dealing with the problem is to simply blow it away. Actually, I recommend this to clean up your SFS database if you are experiencing any SFS related errors in your console.log. Remember that once you blow away your SFS database and re-create it, you will have to recreate your region as well. Once you re-create a region, it of course will be blank until you reload your definitions into the database. There will be no listener or any program defitions, among others. Most people make the mistake of creating a region with the cicscp command but not loading any information in it. By default a CICS region is very dumb and has little useful information until it is loaded with anything specific. In a later posting I will go over CICS tuning and how you can maximize the performance of your CICS regions with a few simple tweaks.